


Du Maurier's Svengali

by AxmxZ (Boanerges)



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: F/M, Hannibal is a sad puppy, Implied Slash, M/M, Other, a sad murdering puppy, dark!Bedelia, hints of D/s
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-26
Updated: 2014-05-26
Packaged: 2018-01-26 14:22:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,594
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1691438
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Boanerges/pseuds/AxmxZ
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hannibal and Bedelia have a chat after the events of Mizumono. Not quite AU - let’s call it an improvisation.</p><p>Un-betaed. Referenced Hannigram; past Hannidelia if you squint.</p><p>Note: this Bedelia is a few years older than Hannibal.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Du Maurier's Svengali

“Let us discuss the… fiasco.”

The pencil on the coffee-table to his left is two degrees off perfect parallel with the edge of the table. He does not get up to adjust it.

“What went wrong, Hannibal?”

Perfectly tailored fabric draping perfectly over a perfectly posed perfect body. Perfect hair framing a perfect face.

Nothing about her looks alive. But who would choose alive over perfect?

He would. Now. He would now.

“Hannibal?”

His lips are cracked. 

His fingers stroke the corduroy arm of the old, worn hotel armchair, finger pads sensitized and comforted by the evenly spaced tracks in the fabric. A bit of stuffing is escaping the seam along the front edge. He runs his fingers through its softness, then forces his hand to his lap, folding it over the other in a pose of contrition.

“I am very sorry.”

A perfect blonde eyebrow rises an eighth of an inch.

“You are very sorry.”

“I failed.”

“You failed,” she echoes again. “Yes. Let's start there.”

The knuckles of his clasped hands whiten in his lap.

“The girl did not make it, they tell me.”

He says nothing.

“Will Graham, on the other hand,” she continues, “was discharged from the hospital today after some minor repairs to the bowel. No major surgery required. Not even resection. Two days’ hospital stay, and he’s home free..?”

The finely pointed question mark hooks and lands him before he can check himself.

“I thought…” He hears his voice catch, but it is too late. “Even if I couldn't turn him fully, I thought he could still be useful.”

“To me? Or to you?”

“Can’t it be both?”

Her smile is so minute he might be imagining it. He hopes he is.

“I’m glad to hear you are not attempting to claim his survival was an accident. Have we finally reached a small oasis of honesty in the vast desert landscape of your lies?”

She lowers her lashes, raises them again.

“What was the one thing I cautioned you against in your dealings with Will?”

“Seeking to become his friend.”

“You were his psychiatrist, Hannibal. You know the rules of this game intimately. You have played it with a score of patients. The influence was supposed to flow one way.”

He swallows against a lump in his throat. “I am not made of stone.”

The almost-smile on her face widens to show a hint of teeth. She crosses her legs.

“No, Hannibal, you are not. You are made of many things, but not of stone. Do you know how I know this?”

His elbows dig into the lower edge of his ribcage as he finds himself eye level with the pointed tip of one of her Versace pumps. When did he fold in on himself?

“I know this, Hannibal, because everything in you deserving of even the slightest curiosity… the most fleeting scrutiny… was planted there by me. Or are you of a mind to argue?”

He shakes his head like one of Will’s dogs coming out of the rain. His hair is in disarray now. Her hair is never in disarray.

Nothing about her is ever in disarray.

“You are not a stupid man, Hannibal.” Her monotone is soothing and soporific, and the opposite of comforting. “You are a product of your environment, but blunted affect does not equal intellectual impairment. Even a Soviet orphan can make something of himself. Or have something made of him, should the right person take interest.”

She uncrosses her legs and rises to walk to the window. He does not rise. Even with almost a foot of height advantage, he always feels dwarfed by her presence. Like an insect on the asphalt, facing the business end of a ladies’ shoe.

He could have been squashed; instead, he had been collected.

Until fairly recently, he never lost sight of the alternative.

“You had such potential in you back then, Hannibal,” she says, still facing the window. “Such creativity, such beautiful rage... It deserved a better outlet than roughing up competitors for a smuggler of West German jeans and cigarettes into Vilnius. And your mind deserved better stimulation than evenings of street basketball on cracked asphalt. Did I not rescue you from that life?”

“Yes.”

“Did I not uproot you, transplant you, instruct you? School your mind; train your body; nourish your soul with the finest things civilization had to offer?”

“Yes.”

“And what did I ask of you in return? Only your obedience. No more than any loving mother would reasonably demand of her child. Well?”

“Please…” he rasps. “Please, don’t send anyone after him.”

She turns towards him again, her silhouette darkened against the milk-white winter sky outside.

“He knows nothing.” Words pour out of him quickly now, quicker than his mouth can form them, and he is starting to lisp and mangle his consonants abominably again, but it does not matter, nothing matters, because he must convince her. “I told him nothing. Please, let him walk away from this. He is useless to you. He is not a murderer; he will never be a murderer! He killed Tier, but it was nothing more than self-defense. Write him off as a loss, please. He will not be seduced.”

“No,” she says thoughtfully. “Not by you, in any case.”

Click… clack… click… clack…

“Whatever made you think you could succeed in this, Hannibal? You had very precise instructions. A well-tested method, with a very reasonable success rate. But you grew bored of being my Svengali and decided to try your hand at being a honeypot.”

Her shadow falls over his shoes.

“It must have been a terrible temptation, to look at him so often and never be allowed to touch. Tell me, Hannibal…”

The voice now murmurs directly into his ear.

“Did you sneak caresses from him whenever his illness rendered him insensible? A touch here, a stroke there, stolen furtively while his eyes were rolled into his head? Did you masturbate frantically over the toilet in your office restroom immediately after his departure, with the scent of his hair still in your nostrils, and hate yourself and your filth afterwards? Tell me. When did you decide to deceive me for the sake of his body?”

“I deceived you for the sake of his soul,” he mutters. “He is not like me. He would not have become what you wanted me to make of him.”

“And what did I want you to make of him?”

“A monster.”

“What is wrong with being a monster, if that is what you truly are?”

“I am that. He is not.”

“So it would seem. Your plans backfired most spectacularly.”

She lifts his chin with a perfectly manicured finger. Her eyes glow electric blue in the dusk.

“You've grown so used to being treated like a rare jewel, Hannibal. So spoiled by mindless adoration from the swine you herd. It must have been quite the shock to realize your precious Will saw you for what you were - and was not impressed." 

The finger rises to swipe lazily at the wetness under his eye, its perfectly manicured talon a fraction of an inch from his cornea.

He forces himself not to blink.

"Do you know what you are?"

He shakes his head minutely.

"Sure you do." The finger swipes under his eye again. "You already said it yourself: you are not made of stone. That's because you are paste, Hannibal. Leaded glass pretending to be a ruby.”

His chin is released, and he gratefully returns his gaze to the floorboards, where it belongs.

"Tell me, how did you intend to entice him? What tempting thing could you offer a beautiful creature like that? Your body – aging, wilting, softening, greying? A life in your dull, prissy company, somewhere in Provence, with young Abbie in tow? Were you thinking of setting up your own little shop, just the three of you?”

"I was not. Please, believe me."

A fingertip lands on his shoulder, tracing up the woolen plaid towards his neck.

“I do believe you,” she murmurs. “It pains me, but I do. Even after all the time and effort I poured into hatching the beautiful monster in you, your most secret desires are so… banal. I made you my right arm, the crafter of my best designs. Yet you were ready to trade all of it for a white picket fence.”

The fingertip caresses his jugular.

“What was it that Chekhov had said, about the slave in the blood? Remind me.”

He unsticks his lips with difficulty. “Chekhov advised a young writer to tell the story of a man who squeezes out the blood of a slave from his own veins, drop by drop, until one morning he wakes up to find that all the blood in him is that of a real human being.”

There is steel now where her fingertip had been, biting into his neck. He does not need to look to know that she is holding his old 'finka' knife. One of his few souvenirs from that lifetime where he wore blood-stained track suits, not pristine plaid. She has kept it for him.

“I guess congratulations are in order.” The smell of latex now admixes to the scent of Chanel No 5. "You've become a real boy, Pinocchio."

He takes the liberty of saying nothing, and take another - his last, he knows - by closing his eyes and thinking of Will, rain-soaked and lovely, of Abigail’s hot blood spilling over his fingers, and of a small house standing empty on the wind-swept cliffs of Cassis.

**Author's Note:**

> First and probably only attempt at something like a Hannibal fanfic. Inspired by the last scene of S2 finale.
> 
> Check out my tumblr at http://axmxz.tumblr.com - mostly Hannibal most of the time


End file.
